Radiomics-informed Deep Curriculum Learning for Breast Cancer Diagnosis

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are traditionally trained solely using the given imaging dataset. Additional clinical information is often available along with imaging data but is mostly ignored in the current practice of data-driven deep learning modeling. In this work, we propose a novel deep curriculum learning method that utilizes radiomics information as a source of additional knowledge to guide training using customized curriculums. Specifically, we define a new measure, termed radiomics score, to capture the difficulty of classifying a set of samples. We use the radiomics score to enable a newly designed curriculum-based training scheme. In this scheme, the loss function component is weighted and initialized by the corresponding radiomics score of each sample, and furthermore, the weights are continuously updated in the course of training based on our customized curriculums to enable curriculum learning. We implement and evaluate our methods on a typical computer-aided diagnosis of breast cancer. Our experiment results show benefits of the proposed method when compared to a direct use of radiomics model, a baseline CNN without using any knowledge, the standard curriculum learning using data resampling, an existing difficulty score from self-teaching, and previous methods that use radiomics features as additional input to CNN models.